The Baltic Chain

History is a remorseless creditor. Eventually, it demands that all accounts be settled in full, sometimes in a currency harder than anyone could have imagined.

Half a century ago, the leaders of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union conspired to deprive three tiny countries on the Baltic of their freedom. Their conspiracy succeeded. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now are among the most discontented constituents of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and those who govern from the Kremlin today are being called upon to settle their debt to history and its victims.

Last week, nearly a million Balts marked the anniversary of the secret Hitler-Stalin pact by joining hands in a human chain of protest extending 400 miles from the Estonian capital of Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. In conjunction with the protest, members of the popular fronts that now dominate the region’s politics issued a statement demanding that Moscow “restore their independent statehood.”

The historical due bill the protesters presented was compelling and indisputable. The Soviet Union, they said, had “infringed on the historical right of the Baltic nations to self-determination, presented ruthless ultimatums to the Baltic republics, occupied them with overwhelming military force, and under conditions of military occupation and heavy political terror carried out their violent annexations.”

How the government of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--whose policies of openness and reconstruction have made possible the resurgence of Baltic nationalism--will respond to all this remains an open question. The possibility of new repression cannot be excluded; on the other hand, a desire to accommodate the Balts, a dynamic and developed people, may help nudge the Soviet system toward some gentler form of socialist federalism that will allow for a fuller expression of national identities.

How the West, particularly the United States, will respond to the nationalist turmoil in the Baltic and elsewhere in the Soviet Union and its bloc also is an open question. A part of us, of all Americans--a romantic part, perhaps--yearns to share in that assertion of human freedom that was expressed so eloquently more than a century ago by the popular leader of another of Europe’s “little” peoples. “No man has a right to put a stop to the forward march of a nation,” said the Irishman Charles Stewart Parnell. “No man has a right to say to a people, ‘This far shall you go, and no further.’ ” At the same time, the principled but prudent voice of a great American statesman who confronted similar situations in his own day counsels caution: “We are the friend of liberty everywhere,” said John Quincy Adams, “but the custodian of none but our own.”